In my opinion the main issue here is the players expectations to accessible content. As Preach points out, players will always find excuses for why they cant access certain content. In earlier expansions it was ilvl and now people are blaming systems like raider.io.

In reality certain players dont have access to certain content because they are simply not good enough or experienced enough. No amount of high ilvl gear will change that. Instead you have a lot of players who only play content which they outgear completely and thereby never gets better. Players going into heroic with an ilvl of 410 and completely cheesing all the game mechanics is not beneficial for anyone.

Players just need to accept that there is certain content they cant access if they are not willing to put in any effort and to get better. The issue has never been ilvl or systems like raider.io. The issue is that you are just not good enough. Realize it and accept it. Stop making excuses.

and its perfeckly ok to not have acces to content that is beyond players skills.

but what is not ok is for those people to have nothing else to pursue while playing game.

BfA is the first expansion in last 5 years since removal of VP when they do have those goals.

and mythic crowd hate it - because for abundance of people its more then enough - most people play indeed only 3-5 hours a week - meaning they will do some WQ if daily with gear / azerite is up , will do WF/WB , will farm darkshore/arathi rares for mounts / transmog , maybe will do few mythic 0 if they have free time or will do lfr ... and they will be ok with it till next reset because all this stuff will already take them 5+ hours - which is how much time they have to play weekly , if they play a bit more they are liekly to level up new allience alt for a hour or 2 before they got bored with it. and are perfeckly happy with this as their content.

imo the biggest problem are atm people who play 20+ hours a week get burned out from playing that much and blame wf/tf on their addiction to game. or the fact that they will hit that hardcap on gear literaly months before it will happen to casual players. because in 1 week they do content that casual people takes 1 month. for those people 1,5 month is worth as much as half of year of gameplay for casual crowd. imagine the burnout there.

That's how you get 'em youtube bucks after all. He's just one of many people with agenda stirring shit up where he can and his agenda is $$ and stirring shit up is the best way to attract masses he needs.

thing is though, the core concept of the arguement isn't wrong, gear literally has no relevance anymore in the game, you no longer bother with BiS, there's no real end to the gearing process to the point where you just don't bother anymore, and if that wasn't bad enough the developers are bankrupt when it comes to interesting and cool ideas to make powerful meaningful items in the game ala the trinket slot, every single trinket until BoD was static stats + stats proc or on use stats, there was nothing special or fun about it you just equip what the highest numbers tell you to equip, like when i think back to wrath and gearing up my mage for BiS at the time you had trinkets that gave you a requirement from your playstyle to trigger them (fire mage needing to use living bomb on single target to trigger the trinket from rotface if memory serves), or had some kind of unique effect that made them powerful but wasn't useful to all specs that used that primary stat unlike today where they are so lazy they have made very very few spec/stat type exclusive items and it has vastly reduced the number of items in the game since they have made the same item have dual stats when used by say a str user or agi user.

retired march 2013 RIP - returned january 2016, purely because paladins finally get Ashbringer!

The underlying issue here is that casuals want access to better gear because they think it will make more content accessible to them. But this wont happen. A bad player will still be bad no matter how much gear you give him/her.

thats bs and lie. spread by people like preach to work for his agenda.

average joe playing wow does not care about mythic + or mythic raids.

its average midcore raider in guilds between 5000-1000 on his alt who is locked out of mythic + by raider.io who is whining on forums about it.

Well, guild stuff was just a side-story, I'm not saying that guild issues are directly correlated to my issues, all i'm saying is that some raiders felt discouraged and quit playing/switched to alts ( which we have to gear up now ), because of the loot system, just the sheer amount of m+ farming they had to do in order to keep their characters up to date was overwhelming. Yea, some of them just quit because of completely unrelated reasons, like , family, work, ect.
Trust me when i say that 2-3% more haste and 2-3% more crit instead of mastery and versa would give me massive performance increase, which is literally a reforge issue ( or, again praying for TF in m+ ).
We can continue this forever man, there is no point, i get what you're saying, but based on what class i play and what situation i'm in right now, i just don't agree with it, it's fine.

Then those raiders are pretty dumb, frankly.

Here's snapshot of our guild's activity this reset - note all the massive amounts of M+ farming we do... You get everything you need, aside from one oddball item, in raid, end of story. As a mythic raider "sheer amount of m+ farming" is the most retarded thing you can do, really, you don't get anything out of it realistically - you do one per week for chest of disappointment (guess why it's called that way) and end of story.

Your average guild ilvl is about 412 - it is more than enough to down Jaina... what more do you need? Reforging would optimize it, but do you really need it, will that suddenly make all the people who bailed in your guild unbail? It's as if you are grasping at straws really.

We're wiping at Jaina now not because of 2% here and there but because we plainly fail mechanics and need practice. That's it.

Current game is designed so people can come back any tier and be raid ready in no time, without having to nag the guild in gearing them up in old content everyone has long tired of. Modern WoW can't afford telling potential people to wait two years until an expansion drops so they can get on the treadmill again.
I understand wanting a 'lasting' reward for your efforts, but if those are performance enhancements such as gear, that is the same as denying other people that took a break the ability to catch-up.

and its perfeckly ok to not have acces to content that is beyond players skills.

but what is not ok is for those people to have nothing else to pursue while playing game.

BfA is the first expansion in last 5 years since removal of VP when they do have those goals.

and mythic crowd hate it - because for abundance of people its more then enough - most people play indeed only 3-5 hours a week - meaning they will do some WQ if daily with gear / azerite is up , will do WF/WB , will farm darkshore/arathi rares for mounts / transmog , maybe will do few mythic 0 if they have free time or will do lfr ... and they will be ok with it till next reset because all this stuff will already take them 5+ hours - which is how much time they have to play weekly , if they play a bit more they are liekly to level up new allience alt for a hour or 2 before they got bored with it. and are perfeckly happy with this as their content.

imo the biggest problem are atm people who play 20+ hours a week get burned out from playing that much and blame wf/tf on their addiction to game. or the fact that they will hit that hardcap on gear literaly months before it will happen to casual players. because in 1 week they do content that casual people takes 1 month. for those people 1,5 month is worth as much as half of year of gameplay for casual crowd. imagine the burnout there.

Those casuals also come and go between games while those hardcore players tend to stick around and pay their sub in good and bad times.

Guess which one has more value to a company long term?

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Originally Posted by HuxNeva

Current game is designed so people can come back any tier and be raid ready in no time, without having to nag the guild in gearing them up in old content everyone has long tired of. Modern WoW can't afford telling potential people to wait two years until an expansion drops so they can get on the treadmill again.
I understand wanting a 'lasting' reward for your efforts, but if those are performance enhancements such as gear, that is the same as denying other people that took a break the ability to catch-up.

And to the OP, badges and tokens are boooooooring!

problem is the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite way. I agree with ya that the days of having to wait between expacs to hop back in to stay competitive is over, and good riddance.

problem though, is that the gear itself is meaningless now and nothing stands out in the way it did even with Legion Legendaries. Love them or hate them, the legion legendary's made the game fun and have longevity to gearing even if it was forced.

Today's gear means absolutely nothing. I was 5/9 mythic before i quit 2 weeks ago and i couldn't tell you a single piece of gear i got this expac, what it does, or where i got it.

I can still name legit every item from vanilla-wotlk i got from raiding because it mattered. The more scarcity it has, the more precious it becomes.

When everyone is special, no one is special so to speak.

I like the idea of catch up mechanics so that people who return aren't stuck 2-3 raids behind (Looking at you, TBC) but the problem is that currently gear is so de-valued due to TF/WF and other catch up mechanics on gear, that most mythic raids are folding behind a "Why bother?" attitude.

This doesn't hurt the guilds at the top chasing Jaina, or the bottom feeders of WoW who wouldn't raid anyway.... it's hurting the heroic/mythic guilds who are left with crap gear and a tremendous sense of apathy, with no relief coming this expac from Blizz.

Those casuals also come and go between games while those hardcore players tend to stick around and pay their sub in good and bad times.

Guess which one has more value to a company long term?

Casuals, because they are the vast silent majority, not a bunch of derps screeching in MMO-C.

It's like some other dude said here - mythic raiders get what they want and ever wanted in WoW first and foremost - top notch raiding game and now with updates in timely fashion since Legion, that's why they can afford to placate casual players a bit and it's fine. Casual players are those who are paying for awesome raids every 6 weeks I get, so I don't mind sharing a bit there.

It’s the “victim-culture” of 2019. You need to watch out that dont offend any of the snowflakes. Participation trophies for everyone! Kids are learning effort is not important because in life you are just handed things.

“Dont want to do good in school? No worries. Money grow on trees.”

No it is not about "victim-culture". Why do people thinks it is fine to throw insults or offensive remarks around and expects people to just laugh it off?

problem though, is that the gear itself is meaningless now and nothing stands out in the way it did even with Legion Legendaries. Love them or hate them, the legion legendary's made the game fun and have longevity to gearing even if it was forced.

This is outright nonsense - even in BoD with its botched difficulty curve - you are not killing Jaina with M+ gear and all in all mythic raider with 415 ilvl and top notch azerite and weapon is a whole hell of a lot stronger than your average 405-ish pleb if that.

Gearing has been largely the same since vanilla. The issue is now there are so many different sources for gear that it's hard to manage them all. The idea that difficulty = gear level is a more complicated argument in Legion/BfA than previously. The main issue being Raiding was the easy king of difficulty. It is not now, Mythic+ can be just as difficult and therefor the rewards should be similar.

My opinion of this "issue" (it's not really an issue seeing as player skill makes a bigger difference than ilvl) is that this stems from Alts being more so than encouraged, but required. Legion required alts just to see all the content, and that mind set has carried on into BfA. Now Blizz needs to put in catch up mechanics to get alts to a reasonable level that they can be swapped in for mains... and we all see how easy it is when gear rains from the sky.

If Blizz went back to pushing "mains" they could remove these catchup mechanics and a large chunk of issues would disappear.

The reality is Preach is bored, gearing is still very similar to how it's always been, play the game, get gear. There is more of it now, but the decision for stats and azerite traits is way more important, which means that your pool for effective equipment is still pretty small.

This is outright nonsense - even in BoD with its botched difficulty curve - you are not killing Jaina with M+ gear and all in all mythic raider with 415 ilvl and top notch azerite and weapon is a whole hell of a lot stronger than your average 405-ish pleb if that.

You are missing the point entirely. The gear is uninteresting. a stat increase of +10 on the SAME ITEM YOU HAVE FROM HEROIC is not interesting from a design stand point. It's completely not memorable.

Even the M+ gear is without any memorable value because you'll just need a higher version of that same item which gives it a real valueless feeling when it's all just the same items valued at different numbers.

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Originally Posted by Kaver

So you think casual players would be okay if high ilvl gear were made less accessible again?

problem is, once the genie is let out of the bottle its hard to put it back in.

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Originally Posted by McFuu

Gearing has been largely the same since vanilla. The issue is now there are so many different sources for gear that it's hard to manage them all. The idea that difficulty = gear level is a more complicated argument in Legion/BfA than previously. The main issue being Raiding was the easy king of difficulty. It is not now, Mythic+ can be just as difficult and therefor the rewards should be similar.

My opinion of this "issue" (it's not really an issue seeing as player skill makes a bigger difference than ilvl) is that this stems from Alts being more so than encouraged, but required. Legion required alts just to see all the content, and that mind set has carried on into BfA. Now Blizz needs to put in catch up mechanics to get alts to a reasonable level that they can be swapped in for mains... and we all see how easy it is when gear rains from the sky.

If Blizz went back to pushing "mains" they could remove these catchup mechanics and a large chunk of issues would disappear.

The reality is Preach is bored, gearing is still very similar to how it's always been, play the game, get gear. There is more of it now, but the decision for stats and azerite traits is way more important, which means that your pool for effective equipment is still pretty small.

Gearing is so far and away from vanilla they are two separate games (hence, classic wow).

When you played classic wow, did you get 10 different versions of the same item? When you beat a dungeon in classic, did you have to just jump up 10 levels of the same dungeon? What about MC? Did we have 4 different versions of MC with samey gear?

No. You had items you could target, and dungeons stalk. It's lost a lot of it's RPG elements of the past in favor of ARPG.

That's great for those who like it, i'm happy they do i really am, but it's not the game i fell in luv with anymore. it's been turned into an ARPG

You are missing the point entirely. The gear is uninteresting. a stat increase of +10 on the SAME ITEM YOU HAVE FROM HEROIC is not interesting from a design stand point. It's completely not memorable.

Even the M+ gear is without any memorable value because you'll just need a higher version of that same item which gives it a real valueless feeling when it's all just the same items valued at different numbers.

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problem is, once the genie is let out of the bottle its hard to put it back in.

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Gearing is so far and away from vanilla they are two separate games (hence, classic wow).

When you played classic wow, did you get 10 different versions of the same item? When you beat a dungeon in classic, did you have to just jump up 10 levels of the same dungeon? What about MC? Did we have 4 different versions of MC with samey gear?

No. You had items you could target, and dungeons stalk. It's lost a lot of it's RPG elements of the past in favor of ARPG.

That's great for those who like it, i'm happy they do i really am, but it's not the game i fell in luv with anymore. it's been turned into an ARPG

If there were 4 different difficulties of Onyxia and 4 different difficulties for dungeons including one that is essentially a sliding scale, and then loot lock out only extended to one difficulty... the gear would have rained from the sky in vanilla as well.

The gearing model is largely the same, kill things and they drop magical trinkets, it's the sources that have increased an absurd amount. Vanilla; Dungeons, Raids, PvP, BoE world drops if you want to consider them, specific profession items. Now; 4 different dungeon difficulties, one of which scales loot and is infinitely runnable, 4 different raid difficulties, WQs (mainly weekly world bosses, WQs aren't gearing better than Mythic Dungeon or Norm Raid)... Not to mention the speed that these can be run.

You are missing the point entirely. The gear is uninteresting. a stat increase of +10 on the SAME ITEM YOU HAVE FROM HEROIC is not interesting from a design stand point. It's completely not memorable.

Quite frankly - this is literally a made-up issue here. Welcome to WoW since WoTLK, I guess? Why is it suddenly such a pressing BoD issue? This was there in your reforge utopia too?

Heck, "from the design standpoint", what differentiates from most item A's to item B's is exactly this +10 here and there. Even in Vanilla - what was the such amazing difference between Ashkandi and Might of Menethil? Yep a couple of stats here and there, weapon speed and such. It is all in all exactly game of numbers.

Provided we have already established that Mythic in fact gives best gear and fast, I am not sure why the above is even an issue considering the gap is enough to impact performance massively, unless you want to tell me optimal 3x415 and 415 weapon (at least) are not enough boost over ilvl 400 ones.

That's why many mythic players view gear as a stepping stone towards doing what they like - downing mythic raids. If you play this game only exquisitely for gear, then there are really many better games for that out there. I think this mentality switch can help a lot of people, instead of trying to force WoW into being what it ain't - do it for what it is or don't, because you don't like it, which is a fine thing.

I've said it a few times, but the game struggles because there's no vision in its design.

There's no attempt to build an experience for specific people, one that has depth and inspires those who enjoy it. The attempts are to mildly entertain as many as possible, no matter what they're doing, and hope that enough of them chuck money at the online services and items.

And that's the question that matters:

What do we want World of Warcraft to inspire?

There should be an experience related vision, with three to four clearly related intentions, in order to create that vision. That's what we had prior to mid-Wrath when those guys moved on and got replaced, and it's the opposite of what we've had since. Nonsense like dungeons having five difficulties, and raids having four, tells you that they're not designed to inspire people who are into that content, they're designed to make sure everyone does them no matter what their interest is.

And why?

Because people who aren't interested in raids need deep content of another type. That used to be the ways quests worked, how dungeons were set up, or the way professions were designed. Now? All of those are dreadful because quests are the same and non-threatening, dungeons have been horrifically shortened, and professions have had their value utterly gutted. The design of all of that was lowered, so that difficulties could be expanded for content that most players don't actually like very much.

It's why so many are looking forward to Classic. It was at least built with a vision that the designers wanted to share.